Now that the World Cup and the Tour de France are all over, SBS, the channel that shows those events, has gone back to its usual TV fair. They are introducing a new season of shows, one of which Christy I watched last night. It's called Anatomy For Beginners. We all like anatomy right? Sounds just like my cup of tea.

Cut to the show. A naked women stands in front of a live studio audience. She wears only a projection of the heart and the basic cardiovascular system. A doctor guy steps up to the naked women and starts explaining how we get oxygen from the air into the rest of the body. Shortly afterwards it is time to get on with the anatomy.

Cut to the corpse. A dead naked man, face plastered in white, genitals shrunken, lies in front of Professor Gunther von Hagen, of Body Worlds fame. Gunther and his unnamed assistant begin a dissection, starting the knife on a deep cut at the rib cage ending in a Y above the legs. They then proceed to start cutting and pulling the skin off of the chest. A few minutes after, Gunther is cutting the ribcage with some very mean looking scissors, the sound of which is very unsettling.

By this point, I've decided that this is the best show ever made. The doctors go about showing the entire cardiovascular system, in the most literal sense. Before they put the lungs into a tray, they go about attaching a pump to the trachea to show the audience how the lungs breathe, and how brilliantly they work, even in dead people. They go about detaching the heart, and cut it in half, so that we can see the all the ventricles and sort out where all the blood comes in and goes out. And to top it off, they pump, via gravity, blood-like plasticine into the lower organs to show how blood streams out to every part of the body.

Words do not do this show justice. Perhaps you'll find yourself watching this show on the BBC4 somewhere for free, or maybe you are the type of person who would want to add this to your dvd collection. Put head to head to CSI, this show wins by a mile.

Next Monday they are going to lay out the entire digestive track of a woman, mouth to anus, on a very long table. A show I am excited to see yet not smell.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I blame Brooklyn for my fascination with graffiti. Its omnipresence forces you to deal with it in one way or another. I look at it much as I do with real art; most of it is trite, boring and downright ugly, yet every once in a while you run into some good stuff. Alas, there are nobody out there to cull out the bad ones, no art dealer, no museum director. Perhaps this is why I'm excited to see something painted on a building wall that is actually creative and well done.

I was excited last week to see that somebody sneaked in a beautiful bit of graffiti on my street. If just magically appeared one day, as I suppose most of of these guys do.

Now I have no way of knowing for sure, but I think that this may be from a London artist by the name of Bansky, who gained notoriety with his cheeky graffiti, and his habit of going into world famous museums like the Louvre and the Tate and hanging his art in them. Bansky, or Banksy-esque, I found a few more tags nearby, which I have more after the link.

Here is one I found in a construction area. It says "Free Range" below the chickens.

Here is another I found in a smaller side-street. I am saddened that it was tagged, so I did some digital magic to make a before shot.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 1:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I hear word that nobody could see the whirlpools spin in my last video. Hence I shall revisit the topic in question with another small Colin-tary, thanks to the kind folks at YouTube. Here you are:

Posted by Colin J Allen at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was thinking that it would be quite the hassle to be a practicing Muslim in the International Space Station. Praying towards Mecca could be quite the problem. However, I think that it is nothing that technology couldn't sort out. I envision fastening yourself into a gyroscopic table-prayer blanket system which would keep you facing Mecca independent of—and in spite of—the the Space Station's earthy rotations.

Just you wait folks, this will be a story someday.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 10:43 PM | Permalink

Let me get to the important questions now. Do the toilets actually flush the other way?

Honestly, it's hard to say. Please have a look at my following experiment.

Posted by Colin J Allen at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)